Thank you all for your comments and questions. Hopefully the following information will help clarify things.
What is the price for your images? We don't intend undercutting the higher priced microstock agencies, we don't believe in short term gain and long term loss. Also our Compass collection allows photographers to offer content at much higher price points, which we are keen to develop, for the right material.
What is the royalty rate for the contributor? Royalty rates normally start at 30%, rising to 40%, but we're offering a special introductory commission of 40% to photographers who sign up now. They have to email
Tavis@pocketstock.com to get a personal code, which they then have to enter online. It's a tricky one royalties, we have been around for a long time and seen a number of agencies, too many to list, offer great rates at the beginning, then offer terrible rates down the road. Ideally we'd be happy with 40%, that's why we are offering this amount as an introduction. We may not offer it for long though as it's an expensive business to get a foothold in – we'll need to spend a lot of money to be successful, but we won't drop your rate if you sign up whilst it's on offer.
Do you have FTP upload? Yes, we certainly do. I just checked and we have around 100 new photographers frantically using it right now, so it's taking a good battering and still standing up.
Do you read out the Meta / IPTC data from the image files, so that we don't have to put in title, description, and keywords again? Yes, again that's not a problem, we have an excellent tech team working on making everything easy for the contributor.
Is it necessary to pick a category out after the uplaod? No, we handle this as part of our search engine development, which we will be heavily developing over time.
Exclusive vs. Non-Exclusive? We are not going out of our way to try to take exclusive content at present, other than phone images, because it will take us some time to get really good sales and we don't want to take images in the pretence that we will make lots of money for the contributor in the early days – we've seem this happen all too often. When the time is right for us and the contributor, we will look at exclusive deals. Until then it just wouldn't be fair for us to go down this road. It won't take us long to get some traction, but it's not going to be days that we do it in. Relationships should be a two way thing, based on honesty, we prefer it that way.
Can the contributor delete their own images? Any time restriction? It's possible to delete images before they go through the quality control process but after that, contributors can cancel their agreement and remove their images. If there are individual images that need removing we can agree to that too, however, we won't take kindly to someone taking their best images and moving them exclusively to someone else. It's not the way we want to develop a successful relationship.
Do you pay for upload in the beginning? No, it's not something we have even considered and will certainly not be doing it. We want contributors to give us images on merit, not because we pay them to hand them over. I am sure most contributors would prefer us to put that money into marketing for growth.
Why should we upload to you? We have plenty of industry experience, a successful track record of building a business, bought by Corbis and we're serious about making a success of Pocketstock. It's not going to be for everyone to come on board early on, but without that support everyone, who has contributed, gets affected. If we don't get enough material, we won't get the clients and from there we won't get the sales. If we get the right material, in both quantity and quality we can assure you all we will make a success of this. We are well financed and in it for the long term, but without revenue, no business can survive.
If you guys don't back us with your content, we, like many others, get pushed down the API road, which is both bad for you and bad for us. You get greatly reduced margins on your sales and we get little SEO traction, as a lot of the traffic goes off site and therefore it becomes more difficult to build a client base. We recently got offered 11 million images, it would be easy to take them, very easy, but I don't believe it's good for the industry, you or us.
That might tell you something about how we want to do this, through relationship building and a good return to you – 40% is much better than the 15% you would have got if we signed the API I am talking about. We didn't see that as fair, so said no. We have also been offered 6 million and 2 million images from other agencies, so API is freely available. I can tell you though, it's not good for you, you make little money from it and compress the distribution channels, which long term will damage your returns.
What make you standout from the other agencies? We want to open this up to a broader contributor base, both at the low end and the high end. We want to represent images from people who have never made money from their images commercially, as well as the traditional microstock guys – you and the top end pros, who have still to get seriously involved in stock, which we have a lot of experience with.
We are also about to offer PocketBriefs to our network. This will be a first for a stock agency. Clients post their briefs and we ping those briefs to the photographers who shoot that type of material. If the request is for a baby, we send it out to our lifestyle photographers, for example. The pricing will be higher and we are happy for the client and photographer to communicate, if required. It'll be a great profile builder for photographers, as well as a likely added revenue stream. This will be based around some very neat technology. We are also developing with our partners, face and image recognition technology, which we will incorporate into our search – we can't say any more, except it's the same technology that is use at Heathrow Airport.
Our new app, which should be ready in six weeks is going to blow your mind. You will be able shoot an image and have it live within minutes. What this space for more news, as we can't say any more right now.
The Pocketstock Academy, which we have just launched will appeal to everyone. At it's core are inspirational and educational videos; from how to shoot almost anything to lighting techniques. This we will expand to 50 videos by the end of July, some for beginners, some for experts – like you guys and much in-between. We have a whole department dedicated to this.
There's a lot going on at Pocketstock, but we can't do everything at once. From June 1st, when we launch our sales operation, in UK and USA – we plan to move into Germany next – we will hope to be able expand our differentiators quite a bit more.
Why do you think that you can bring in enough sales for the contributor to make it interesting for us? We have given a few pointers to this above. In addition, we know what we are doing, we built a multi million dollar business in this space before. We have a big marketing plan and we are well supported. If we do the right things and give ourselves some stand out, which we know we can, the customers will come, it just takes time. There are a lot of guys who set up in this industry that believe you just have to turn up to be successful, we don't. We know it will be hard, but we have the tools and the experience of what works and what does not. Money also helps, as no one is going knock any of the big four off their perch without it. It's a $1billion business and the top four make up about $800m of that, that still leaves $200m. We plan to take some of this and some of the $800m too.
How do we get paid? Paypal? Yes, PayPal is the preferred method of payment, although we can also pay by Moneybookers since PayPal isn't an option in all countries. Once you earn $70 you can cash out.
Bis bald.
Marianne
naja... eine interessante Info für uns alle ist jedenfalls: